Chinese characters

Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention. Over time, the function, style, and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. Informed by a long tradition of lexicography, modern states using Chinese characters have standardised their forms and pronunciations: broadly, simplified characters are used to write Chinese in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia, while traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

After being introduced in order to write Literary Chinese, characters were later adapted to write the languages spoken in other countries throughout the Sinosphere. In Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, Chinese characters are known as kanji, hanja, and chữ Hán respectively. Each of these countries used existing characters to write both native and Sino-Xenic vocabulary, and created new characters for their own use. These languages each belong to separate language families, and generally function differently from Chinese. This has contributed to Chinese characters largely being replaced with alphabets in Korean and Vietnamese, leaving Japanese as the only major non-Chinese language still written with Chinese characters.

Unlike in alphabets, where letters correspond to a language's units of sound, called phonemes—Chinese characters correspond to morphemes, a language's smallest units of meaning. Writing systems that function this way are known as logographies. In Chinese, morphemes are usually single syllables, characters may represent multi-syllable words when writing other languages. Characters are not ideographic, as they correspond to spoken morphemes, but not to the abstracted ideas themselves. Most characters are made of smaller components that may provide information regarding the character's meaning or pronunciation.